


Kobol's First Gleaming

by lolcat202



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 06:57:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8362051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lolcat202/pseuds/lolcat202
Summary: The path to Earth is littered with stones in the road.





	

He’d like to say that it’s the rocks digging into his back that are keeping him awake. He’d like to say it, but it’d be a lie. Lee Adama is far too honest to lie, at least not to himself. It’s not the rain on Kobol, or the rocks, or the fact that he can’t quite reconcile himself to the fact that Kara is asleep next to him.

It’s the events of the day, and that’s all. Sure it is. Don’t lie, Lee, it isn’t becoming of an officer of the fleet.

It’s his father, lost and returned to him with more grace and absolution than he deserves. It’s Kara lying beside him, but dreaming of someone else a million miles away on Caprica. It’s putting his faith in Laura Roslin, then seeing her for all the clay feet than an idol always has. It’s a vision of Earth that he doesn’t quite know how to reconcile. He’s not a true believer, but he’s not a non-believer like his father. He wants to believe, but he doesn’t know how.

And yet, his father has forgiven the president when he can’t quite force himself to do the same. His father, who has a right to judge her, has forgiven her. He doesn’t give her the same leeway his father has because Lee never did have much use for anything other than black and white rules of law. Another shortcoming - Lee doesn’t have the same soft spot the mighty Bill Adama always had for gray areas. Zak, Kara, Saul…Laura. Human frailties count for something, even at the end of the worlds. Not much point in staying on the straight and narrow when veering into the out-of-bounds worked just as well, huh, Captain?

When did everything get so frakked up?

He huffs out a breath and shifts again, trying to find a comfortable position under the tarp. Lee never felt at home in his rack on a battlestar, not like his father did, but he misses the low thrumming of Galactica’s engines and the battered pillow he stole from Helo’s rack after the fall of the Colonies. Guess he’ll have to give that back now.

Helo…If ever there were a model for the straight and narrow, it would be that guy. They’d crossed paths a few times over the years, and up until Helo appeared with Starbuck and the Cylon, he’d never had a bad word to say about him. Now…now he doesn’t know what to think. More puzzles chasing around his brain, pieces that don’t fit but keep trying to mash themselves together, keeping him wide awake and well aware of his weapon at his side. Sharon (not Sharon, but Sharon was never Sharon either) might think she knows who she is, but Lee doesn’t believe her. Helo does, and that’s a problem.

Maybe the problem is that Helo doesn’t get it. Sharon knows she’s a Cylon. The Cylons know that humanity is the enemy. She’s a viper in their midst. Poison, no matter what Helo tries to tell himself. Coiled and waiting to strike, to put a few more bullets in the old man and finish the job.

A man isn’t a man until he wears the wings of a Viper pilot. How is a Viper better than a viper? Maybe he should have just said frak it all and been a farmer on Aerelon. Raised sheep, or something. He laughs at the mental picture of Lee Adama…Lee Adama, the CAG, Captain Apollo, the shining star of his class living on a remote farm. He’d have a beard and wear overalls. Chew on an errant strand of hay and read sunrises and sunsets rather than star charts.

“Yeah, right,” he whispers to himself.

“Would you shut up already? Some of us are trying to sleep.” Kara kicks him in the shin, harder than he probably deserves. Then again, Kara’s never been shy about giving him what he deserves, hard or not.

“You’d sleep through the apocalypse,” he says, and he’s surprised by how bitter he sounds.

“As I recall,” she says, shifting up to her elbows and drilling him with a glare that he can only describe as salty (back when they had salt, back when life had flavor, back when they had anything other than algae), “I was wide awake and in the brig for the last apocalypse.”

He can’t help himself; he laughs. For all his navel-gazing, there’s something to be said for Kara’s bluntness. His laughter is echoed unintentionally from a few yards to the north, and he turns toward the sound. Helo and the Cylon, cast into shadows by a dying flashlight, are having a chuckle. Hilarious. People died down here on this little ragtag adventure. They may have a map to Earth, but no clue how long it’s going to take to get there, or what they’ll find when (if) they ever get there. Lee can’t stop weighing every step they took on this planet, but Helo and Sharon look like they’re ready to build a campfire and roast marshmallows. It’s just another adventure to them, but to him, it’s a question of who he is. Lee Adama, or Captain Apollo, or someone who still doesn’t have a name.

And Kara wonders why he can’t sleep. “Nobody else is sleeping,” he sighs. “Why should we?”

She studies him, same way she’s always looked right through him. Same way he’s always been the first to break eye contact, he looks away from the camp, finds a point in the darkness to study. Never distant enough for Kara not to call him on it. How far does he have to get from her to stop feeling completely exposed?

“Whatever weight of the world you’re trying to carry, for frak’s sake, put it down already. You and I both know you can’t bench press for shit. Go to sleep.” With that, she rolls over and pulls her jacket up to cover her face. Conversation over. You are dismissed, Captain.

He settles back into the rocks and damp pine needles and tries to turn off his brain. Farmer Adama starts counting sheep. He gets up to 102 before the soft sound of laughter makes his flock scatter once again.

This time, it’s not coming from above. This time, it’s coming from below, and though he hasn’t heard it before, he knows the source. Laura Roslin is laughing. Laura Roslin is sharing a tent with his father, and she’s laughing. He rolls onto his side so that he can see the spot that the two leaders of the dying human race have marked out for themselves.

Laura Roslin is laughing, and she’s leaning against his father as she does it. His father is laughing too, he can see. Quietly, but he’s laughing, and his forehead is resting against the president’s. For a second, he’s a petulant ten-year-old again, jealous of his father’s shore leave, jealous that his father has once again reclaimed the attention his mother devoted to him and Zak. Jealous that his father dropped his bags under the tarp Lee had set up for her, effectively claiming his spot. Claiming his place by her side, when the last time they’d seen each other, his father had thrown her in the brig.

Then again, he can’t remember the last time his father laughed with his mother. Oh, he can remember his mother laughing at his father, but he can’t remember the last time he saw them ever share space the way his father and the president are doing now. Something has changed, something he doesn’t get. You’ll understand when you’re older, his father had told him the day that he’d packed his bags and left the house. He’s older, and he still doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand, but they clearly do, and he’s once again swimming to a lifeboat he can’t quite reach, anchored in waters that shift from inky black to iron gray.

Kara’s breathing gets deeper and steadier, and he knows that she’s not faking to get away from talking about feelings. She’s not above it, but she doesn’t need it here on Kobol. Kara has done her job, and at the end of the job, a pilot gets R & R. Rules need to be followed. 

The light flickers and dies under Sharon and Helo’s tarp, and they grow silent in the darkness. He can hear Billy’s soft snores, and Chief’s decidedly not soft snores. Above and below and in the middle of it all, his father and the president whisper to each other late into the night. They don’t need light to see each other. Lee needs light to see them, but all they have left on this godsforsaken planet are stars that don’t match up with a map to home. Thousands of light years away, a dim twinkle does him no good. In a day of uncertainties, one truth shines above all others: he has no star to steer by, and he’s the only one in this camp that doesn’t.

When did everything get so frakked up? he asks himself again, and he worries the answer over and over in his mind until the repetition lulls him into a dreamless sleep.

***  
It’s funny, his apology for a military coup comes just after he stages a military invasion of her tent. Bags dumped unceremoniously on the blanket she’s been struggling to keep dry in this neverending drizzle, camouflage and boots and soldier taking up all the space around her so that she’s forced to sit with her legs curled underneath her.

He doesn’t force her to do anything, not now, even as she tries to make sense of his presence. She’s not going to force him out of her space to set up his own camp, not when he’s come all this way and brought Billy back to her. She fights the urge to curl up into a ball to make room for the weight of him. He shifts directly into the path of a leak in the tarp to make room for the weight of her.

His apologies aren’t for the faint of heart. Nor are they entirely apologies, she reminds herself as he tells her with all the sincerity that she’s come to expect from Bill Adama that he forgives her.

“I didn’t ask for your forgiveness,” she reminds him. She didn’t ask, but she’s glad for it anyway. He invades her space, crosses her borders, but she’s tired of living in this barren wasteland all alone. She passes over a canteen – a peace offering - and settles in a little closer, her knees just edging over his battle lines. She breathes in two countries, and the air is sweet and rich and heady and just enough for the both of them.

***

She should be exhausted. She is exhausted – from the hike, from the gunfire and death and fear, from the revelations in the tomb – she’s exhausted, but she can’t stop talking. She jumps from one subject to another at light speed, leaving him almost no time to catch her thoughts before she’s on to the next. The rest of the camp is falling silent, but she can’t turn off her brain long enough to let her body find the rest that it so desperately needs.

She hasn’t talked this much since long before the fall, since she came home from college and tried to fit a semester’s worth into a dinner conversation with her sisters. Bill doesn’t try to interrupt her; he just hands her the canteen when her voice gets scratchy.

She takes a deep swig and wipes her mouth with the sleeve of the too-big field jacket Lee had scrounged up for her. “Can you believe this?” she asks him, a little stunned, a little childlike in her delight, a little afraid that things have worked out so easily in the end. In the beginning. In whatever this is.

“No,” he says. Always a man of few words. “I also can’t believe that you’re traipsing around the forest in a pantsuit.”

It takes her a second to realize that he’s made a joke, and when she does, the nervous giggles that she’s been forcing down since he first sat under her tarp bubble up and burst out of her. It is ridiculous. “This suit was dry-clean only,” she says, and laughs again.

“Next time you pack for the apocalypse, you should check your labels.”

“Next time I pack for the apocalypse, I’m bringing someone else to be President.” To be the dying leader, she doesn’t say, because she doesn’t want to broach that topic just yet.

“Just not Adar. He was a jackass.”

“Not Adar,” she agrees. Someday she’ll tell him just how much of a jackass Adar was, but for now, she’ll let that thought float away, a feather on the wind.

“I told Billy you thought he’d be president one day. Hope you don’t mind.”

She doesn’t mind, not at all. Seeing Billy again, talking to him, hearing him tell her that he believes in her reminds her of how much she doesn’t say to him. She makes a mental note to add to her daily agenda. Item 1. Let Billy in.

“He’s a good kid.”

“They’re all kids to you, aren’t they?” She waves a hand at the campsite where Lee and Kara sleep, where Helo and Sharon whisper, where Billy and the Chief snore in a discordant harmony.

“Compared to us? Yes.” He smiles before she can be insulted that he just called her old, and this time, when she laughs, he joins her. She leans into him, pressing her forehead to his, so grateful to have him here and alive and holding her up. Old bones and all.

Metaphorically, and now it seems physically as well. She’s so tired that her hands have started to shake. She presses them into her thighs, hoping that he won’t notice the tremors. Of course he does; he’s Commander Adama and he sees everything. He’s Bill Adama too, and lately, he knows when to keep his mouth shut. He tugs at her arm, pulling her against him as he tucks the blanket up over her shoulders.

“You really need to get some sleep,” he says. “I’m not carrying you back to the Raptor tomorrow, Madam President.”

Sleep. Sleep sounds good, and for the first time since the world ended, sleep sounds like a blessing. Still, she doesn’t want to sleep, knowing he won’t.

“I know what you’re doing,” she murmurs. “You don’t have to keep watch.” Zarek won’t attack, not now, not after everything they’ve seen and done. Tomorrow may be different, but tonight is nothing but rain and crickets and wind whispering through trees.

“Last time I didn’t, everything went to hell.” She doesn’t have to see the lines on his face to know that he wallows in regrets. He builds his borders with bricks made of mistakes that even the mighty Bill Adama couldn’t have seen coming. Not from CIC, not from sickbay, not from an education secretary with a mandate to turn Galactica into a museum. Some of the bricks are molded by her hands, and she’s left a trail of them for him to carry for far too long.

“You can blame me for that, you know.” She’s serious. She’ll take the blame for dividing the fleet and pay the consequences when they return. It’s the least she can do. He gave her forgiveness, unasked; she grants him absolution, unconditional.

“I do.”

“Liar.”

He chuckles, and she can feel his chest vibrate against her shoulder. “You are different,” she says softly. “I like it.” The steady rise and fall of his breathing is lulling her into sleep, no matter how hard she wants to fight it.

“I do too,” she hears him whisper.

“We’re going to be ok,” she reminds him. She believes it, for the first time in months.

“I know,” he says as he threads his fingers through hers. Skin against skin, building a foundation between the two of them. He believes it too, and that’s enough to push her over the edge into a deep, dreamless sleep.


End file.
